"The wound to this building will not be forgotten, but it will be repaired."*

Washington Travel Blog

We didn't have too much time on Sunday because we had to take a late afternoon flight since the last one was not open. We decided to go the Pentagon and see the memorial there. It had just been reopened the day before. Places like this make me feel very weird. On one hand, I definitely want to see it. On the other, it makes me feel very awkward to take pictures because it's not some tourist destination. If I lived in DC, I imagine I would come here alone now and then and just be there to honor those that lost their lives. But in only a half hour, it was difficult for me to run that through my brain. The memorial is a series of benches, each with the name of someone who lost their life on 9-11. The benches are aligned according to the year each person was born.

Pentagon Memorial

So what I did was find my own birth year, which is 1974, walk along that line, and pay a small tribute to each of those individuals.

On a personal note, 9-11 changed my life. I did not lose anyone physically, but it started a chain of events that resulted in the end of my marriage. Our income relied entirely on the airline industry. On September 10, my biggest worry was that my then infant daughter had to get her first shots the next day and I was scared for her. On September 12, it was that neither of us had a job... and would not for six months after that. I'm not going to go into the personal details about what happened because of that. Or what happened as a result of what happened as a result of that. And so on and so forth. People who know me now but didn't then often ask me why I married such a loser.

Pentagon Memorial

Well, he wasn't always a loser. He just didn't deal with stress well, and losing his job on 9-11 broke him. But it didn't break me. In fact, it did the opposite. It made me see how you have to live every second of your life in the moment, and appreciate everything and everyone for exactly what they are. There is no other option as far as I'm concerned. Ironically enough, July 19 would have been my 9th wedding anniversary.

We took the 5:30 flight home and it worked out perfectly. I even had time to clean my apartment when I got home that evening.

*President Bush, October 11, 2001(as a tree hugging, bleeding heart liberal, I hesitated to use a quote from Bush, but it was appropriate, what can I say)